Monday, February 11, 2013

When Palestinian Textbooks Don't Teach Hatred of Jews, They Fabricate Ancient "Palestinian" History

Contradictions abound; Palestinian leaders claim to be descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and the first Christians. They also “hijacked” Jesus and ignored his Jewishness, at the same time claiming the Jews never were a people and never built the Holy Temples in Jerusalem.Eli Hertz, Mandate for Palestine: The Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights

Do you know when the Palestinian people came to be, or when their national identity was formed? A textbook taught at one of the Palestinian Authority schools states that the "ancient history of Palestine bore witness to the invasion of the Israelites, led by Joshua in [the 12th century B.C.E.], and to their battle with the Canaanites and the Palestinians." If that is the case, Joshua and his army didn't conquer Canaan, they conquered Palestine, which, according to this textbook, existed in the 12th century B.C.E. (if not earlier). In that case, it was Palestinians who lived between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
"King David fought the Canaanites and the Palestinians and built his kingdom on part of the Palestinian land," so claims one Palestinian textbook, according to a study published last week, titled "Victims of Our Own Narrative? Portrayal of the 'Other' in Israeli and Palestinian Schoolbooks."

And there is another so-called fact printed in Palestinian textbooks that has been deemed worthy of teaching Palestinian schoolchildren: We didn't know it, but the Palestinians were led by Goliath. The Philistine Goliath was a Palestinian leader. But the only link between Philistines and Palestinians is the similarity in the pronunciation and spelling of the names.

These fabrications are of course par for the course, and the fact that the Arabs repeat these distortions of history incessantly, does not magically transform them from fiction to fact.

In the July 1986 issue of Commentary Magazine, Erich Isaac, a professor of geography at City College and his wife Rael Jean, explained Whose Palestine?

The Gilmours expand upon the PLO chestnut that the Arabs of Palestine are the true "immemorial" inhabitants of the land. They write: "Their ancestors are the Canaanites and Philistines who, unlike the Jews, were never deported. They remained in Palestine . . . and their descendants formed, and still form, the core of the indigenous population." But not only are the Palestinian Arabs not descendants of Canaanites, it is highly doubtful that more than a very few are even descended from those who settled the country as part of the Arab invasion of the 7th century. For over a thousand years following the Arab conquest, Palestine underwent a series of devastating invasions, followed by massacres of the existing population: Seljuk Turks and Fatimid reconquerors were followed by Crusaders who were followed by waves of Mongol tribes who were followed in turn by Tartars, Mamelukes, Turks, and incessant Bedouin raiders.

In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries Palestine was essentially repopulated by foreigners, some coming from great distances. Egyptians arrived in a number of waves, with an especially large one from 1832 to 1840. Sudanese pioneered successfully in the swampy marshlands. Entire tribes of Bedouin from as far away as Libya settled on the coastal plain. Abandoned villages in the Galilee were resettled by Lebanese Christians. Coastal towns attracted Armenians, Syrians, Turks. The French expansion in North Africa resulted in waves of refugees coming to Palestine; many of the followers of the Algerian resistance leader Abd el Kader went to the Galilee, where they founded a number of villages (Samakh, Deishum). Russian expansion into the Caucasus led to the emigration of many of its Muslim peoples (Circassians and Georgians) who were welcomed by the Ottoman empire; many of these made their way to Palestine, where they founded their own villages. Similarly, the Austrian advance into the Balkans led to the emigration of Bosnian Muslims to Palestine. Turkomans from Russian Central Asia and Kurds complete this roster of "Canaanites." Ironically, the only surviving "Canaanite" culture is that of the Jews, who everywhere still pray, and in Israel also speak, in a Canaanite language. [emphasis added]

In fact, none of the concepts that Abbas used developed until vastly later. The Plst—a Mediterranean group known to the Egyptians as one of the "Sea Peoples" and who gave their name to the biblical Philistines—arrived around 1200 B.C.E. Arabs are known in Mesopotamian texts as residents of the Arabian Peninsula from around 900 B.C.E. The concept of a "nation" emerged with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and their neighbors sometime after 900 B.C.E. The Romans renamed the Kingdom of Judea "Palestina" after the biblically attested Philistines, the hated enemy of the Israelites, following the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 C.E. The ethnic identity called "Palestinian," denoting the local Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the region south of Lebanon and West of the Jordan River, tenuously developed as an elite concept at the end of the Ottoman era and did not propagate to the grassroots until the 1920s and 1930s.[emphasis added]

One wonders whether there is anything the "Palestiians" will not claim in their pursuit of the destruction of Israel. Misleading their own people -- especially their children -- is obviously not a problem.

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